Welcome Aaron, and sorry for the very delayed hello and glad you are here with us on TeaChat! Being married to the mod, although has many advantages, also has the disadvantage of having to share computer time, and his share is always larger than mine!

Anyway, your work is just breathtaking and adds a very nice element to the forum. There are a few of your works that are on my 'want/need to have' list. Guess I better decide quickly before they are sold.

Interestingly, I wrote it a bit like an English palindrome: a group of words that can be read in either direction, like "tenet" for example. In Chinese, these pieces can be read as "Tea and Zen have the same flavor" ; "Zen and Tea have the same flavor" ; "One flavor, Tea and Zen" ; and/or all of the above.

Indeed, my favorite kind of Japanese teaware is antique Shino, which is crackled creamish-brown like the Kyusu painting shown in this thread and on my site. The cracks all fill up with tea, turn brown and are--to me--oh so delightful. Sometimes, I lose myself in their patterns, sipping Gyo... (Below is one of mine from the Meiji period)

That chawan belongs to the Japanese master I studied with when I lived in Japan. I believe it was of Korean origin, and definitely very old. It was cream and turquoise and covered in cracks that were also filled with tea stains. I used to revolve it in my hands for up to an hour, like a mantra. I only wish I had a photo.

I wrote it like that with the left side as stairs to represent the hard climb to enlightenment. I should mention a bit about my calligraphic style: At first, I spent a few years with my first two teachers learning the traditional scripts (I especially like the grass scripts). However, my current master has a different philosophy. He suggests that following traditional form is more like handwriting and that even the masters of long ago who wrote in those forms were masters because, like in tai chi or gong fu, they knew the form but bent it and transformed it beyond itself, transcending the form in other words. He often compares calligraphy to drawing portraits, saying that if you draw someone's picture in photographic realism they might as well have taken a photograph. Instead, we spend as much time learning the etymology of characters, and the many ways they have been written through time, to find the 'essence' of the word--in the same way as one drawing a portrait would look for the 'spirit' of the model. Then we learn about breathing properly and focusing Qi into the brush to capture that spirit. Funny enough, my master says that we foreigners can, in his opinion, learn to make better calligraphy because the characters are still pictures (art) to us whereas his Chinese students have to overcome their education, which has turned the symbols into mere words--the same words they think in.

The "Shadowy Portal" is the Daoist term for enlightenment. A famous saying is: "Entering the Shadowy Portal, they pass beyond the World of Dust to the realm of the immortals."
There are thousands of Daoist texts and commentaries (5400ish to be exact). If you are looking for English literature, on the other hand, Thomas Clearly has several good, though very dry, translations. Blofeld has a good overview called "Taoism, the Road to Immortality" (He also wrote the first English book on tea by the way). Alan Watts' final book "The Watercourse Way", finished after his death by a friend, is also great. From there, follow your heart and the network these books open up.

Here is a piece by my master, Wu Chung Chi (Wu Jiru). If you have access to issue one of AoT you can read more about him. Notice the tremendous difference in quality between master and student, his work and mine: